This is going to be a very long post. Mods, delete it, move it, do what you want with it.
I've made some 4700+ posts on these forums and maybe 10% of those posts are actually worth a shit. I've always considered myself lucky and honored to be allowed to be a non-SOF member of an SF/SOF website. And FWIW, I'd like to leave something here that's meaningful and may even be of help to somebody down the road. It's my take on PTSD.
PTSD is a real thing. It's a shame that it can be exploited by posers, frauds and non-hacks...but it's real and it can be treated. I think there are various therapies and medications that can help. But I don't think it can be cured anymore than memories can be erased.
I suffered with PTSD issues after Vietnam. I didn't know what was wrong with me. I had a lot of anger, moments of rage, depression and sadness. I got married right after the Marine Corps and got divorced after 11 months. For the next 23 years I avoided relationships, friendships, had no tolerance for petty bullshit, wasn't shy at telling bosses to go fuck themselves, and had numerous jobs. I'd be in the man-cave and sometimes it was very much like Willard in the hotel room in Saigon...the walls moving in on me. I'd lace up the combat boots, head out to the seediest low-dive bars I could find, put When the Levee Breaks on the juke box and proceed to get hammered. Sometimes I got in fights. A couple of times I spent the night in jail. Sometimes I end up in the strangest places at 3am.
In 1980 I joined the North Carolina Air Guard. I thought it would help to be back in uniform. And it did to some degree. It felt good. I stuck with it for six years and then things started to unravel again. I quit my job, quit the Guard, moved to Florida and tried to lose myself.
__________________________________________
It wasn't combat. It wasn't the firefights. It wasn't even the booby-traps. The danger, the stress, the sleep deprivation, the hyper-vigilance is normal, acceptable in war. It's good to kill the bad guys. It feels good. It's the other stuff, the weird shit that comes out of nowhere, children burned, blown-up, mother's wailing in grief, friends hurt bad, even killed...Two weeks in the bush, I saw a young woman, a female Viet Cong suspect--about my age--tied to a bench, a rag stuffed down her throat and water poured on the rag by my South Vietnamese counterparts. I watched that girl drown for 45 minutes. It wasn't my place to do anything about it. I was a fucking 19-year-old Pfc at the time. This was their war. This was civil war at its ugliest.
I got hardened after a while to shit like this. I accepted it. When we killed a bunch of Viet Cong and celebrated with beer, that was cool. And then something else would happen. We had three wounded VC POWs lying on the ground. They were being treated by our Corpsman prior to their evac. Then one of our ARVN NCO's walked over, pushed Doc back out of the way, flipped his selector on full-auto and killed them all in one long burst. What the fuck? What do you do? Just fucking nailed them. I'll tell you what you do. You say, fuck it, it don't mean nothin. It's their war. It's fucked up but it's Vietnam. You're not in Kansas, anymore, Dorothy.
The firefights, the running gunfights, that's SOP. That's what you're there for. To kill the enemy. Then something weird happens. Dan Gallagher and John Arteaga are saddling up, getting ready to go mobile to their ambush site at sundown. Gallagher slings a LAAW over his shoulder and it detonates...spontaneous detonation of a Light Anti-Tank Assault Weapon and they're dead. No enemy around. Two young men blown to bits and nobody ever figured out why.
Then there's Greg Keller. Hot, humid day, long patrol. Take five, everybody, drop your rucks, smoke em if you got em. He shrugs off his ruck, sits down wearily...and disappears in a brilliant white flash and horrendous bang. Nothing but smoke and dust and blood and a mangled corpse. And no enemy around. Nobody to shoot at, nobody to pay for this.
Paul "Tex" Hernandez. Young kid from Texas. Shot in the back by a VC sniper. We carried him on a poncho to the medevac Huey and never expected to see him again. But he lived. He made it. He spent the rest of his life in a wheelchair and died of cancer in 1998.
We had contacts. We were pretty goddam good at killing the enemy. We did our job well. We killed them and got beer and those were the good times. Then one night Ronnie Ross get's murdered by an ARVN Lieutenant, shot down in front of us in a green-on-blue, 13 rounds of 556, pointblank, full-auto, right below the flak-jacket in the thighs and groin. A Mexican standoff ensues, Marines threatening to kill every goddam South Vietnamese in sight, the ARVNs ready to shoot back. Ross is bleeding out. Our Corpsman is working on him, but what the fuck can anybody really do with this kind of wound? I have to call in the medevac. Everybody's standing around with locked and loaded M16s, screaming at each other. Sgt. Hutson is trying to defuse the intensity.
I radio 7th Company HQ. Request priority medevac and immediate foot react to help us contain what might be a bloodbath. The XO says he's on the way with a react team but at least 20 minutes out. Eventually the guns start coming down. The minutes tick by. Doc is packing holes, he's got an IV going. He's doing everything he can to keep Ross alive. Twenty minutes go by. Sgt Hutson is getting frantic. Where the fuck is that Dust-Off? I don't know. It's taking forever. Finally I get the hand-off to the incoming bird. Are we taking ground fire? Negative. The XO arrives with six Marines. Strobe is out. Huey lands, we lug Ross to the bird and he's away. We get taken out of the bush that night, we hump two clicks to the 7th Co Compound to spend the rest of the night behind sandbags and barbed wire and I fucking breakdown and sob like a fucking baby.
A month later Ross dies in Japan. I'm back in the bush with a new team. Here, more gunfights, more weirdness, more casualties. A lot more casualties, more medevacs... and finally I get hit. Both legs, multiple frag wounds. But I'm alive, I didn't get captured and I'm not going to lose anything. It's over. Fuck the wounds. The physical wounds heal. They may hurt for years, decades...the pieces they leave in may migrate, form cists, itch, come out in the shower, need to get removed years down the road. But that's SOP. That's part of the deal. It's the other shit that hurts and never stops hurting.
______________________________________________
You get older. You take your medication. Shit happens in your life. I met a divorced woman with two little boys, fell in love, had a child of our own. A instant family. But still dealing with issues that threatened to destroy everything. Get help or I'm leaving. Get help or all this will vanish.
I'm a lucky, lucky man. I got help. I found out that other guys had been through the same shit. The war, yes, but more importantly, the years after the war, when you're drifting in a lonely sea and feel isolated from society. When pressures start building, bosses jump in your shit, bills pile up, you're in debt...these are things you can't shoot your way out of, you can't kill the bank, you can't kill the mortgage, the car payment. You have to realize that you need somebody to help you, the Vet Center, the VA, your battle buddies, your military peers, your friends and family. You've got to seek help and get it.
There is life and happiness after war and PTSD. War, for good or bad, is part of your character. It'll always be there. That's why old veterans in their 80s and 90s still shed a tear. It ain't going away. But you can come to terms with it. Through therapy, counciling, medication, spirituality, walking through the fucking woods. I've mentioned before that anti-depressants, counceling, group therapy with other combat vets...and my children have all helped me cope and have given me joy.
Never give up. The military trains you to never give up, even when things look the darkest. That goes for post-war life too. Life is a long movie, with many twists and turns and unexpected things happen all the time. You never know now where you'll be in ten years. Life is a movie. Never walk out before the show is over because if you do, you'll miss the Happy Ending.
I've made some 4700+ posts on these forums and maybe 10% of those posts are actually worth a shit. I've always considered myself lucky and honored to be allowed to be a non-SOF member of an SF/SOF website. And FWIW, I'd like to leave something here that's meaningful and may even be of help to somebody down the road. It's my take on PTSD.
PTSD is a real thing. It's a shame that it can be exploited by posers, frauds and non-hacks...but it's real and it can be treated. I think there are various therapies and medications that can help. But I don't think it can be cured anymore than memories can be erased.
I suffered with PTSD issues after Vietnam. I didn't know what was wrong with me. I had a lot of anger, moments of rage, depression and sadness. I got married right after the Marine Corps and got divorced after 11 months. For the next 23 years I avoided relationships, friendships, had no tolerance for petty bullshit, wasn't shy at telling bosses to go fuck themselves, and had numerous jobs. I'd be in the man-cave and sometimes it was very much like Willard in the hotel room in Saigon...the walls moving in on me. I'd lace up the combat boots, head out to the seediest low-dive bars I could find, put When the Levee Breaks on the juke box and proceed to get hammered. Sometimes I got in fights. A couple of times I spent the night in jail. Sometimes I end up in the strangest places at 3am.
In 1980 I joined the North Carolina Air Guard. I thought it would help to be back in uniform. And it did to some degree. It felt good. I stuck with it for six years and then things started to unravel again. I quit my job, quit the Guard, moved to Florida and tried to lose myself.
__________________________________________
It wasn't combat. It wasn't the firefights. It wasn't even the booby-traps. The danger, the stress, the sleep deprivation, the hyper-vigilance is normal, acceptable in war. It's good to kill the bad guys. It feels good. It's the other stuff, the weird shit that comes out of nowhere, children burned, blown-up, mother's wailing in grief, friends hurt bad, even killed...Two weeks in the bush, I saw a young woman, a female Viet Cong suspect--about my age--tied to a bench, a rag stuffed down her throat and water poured on the rag by my South Vietnamese counterparts. I watched that girl drown for 45 minutes. It wasn't my place to do anything about it. I was a fucking 19-year-old Pfc at the time. This was their war. This was civil war at its ugliest.
I got hardened after a while to shit like this. I accepted it. When we killed a bunch of Viet Cong and celebrated with beer, that was cool. And then something else would happen. We had three wounded VC POWs lying on the ground. They were being treated by our Corpsman prior to their evac. Then one of our ARVN NCO's walked over, pushed Doc back out of the way, flipped his selector on full-auto and killed them all in one long burst. What the fuck? What do you do? Just fucking nailed them. I'll tell you what you do. You say, fuck it, it don't mean nothin. It's their war. It's fucked up but it's Vietnam. You're not in Kansas, anymore, Dorothy.
The firefights, the running gunfights, that's SOP. That's what you're there for. To kill the enemy. Then something weird happens. Dan Gallagher and John Arteaga are saddling up, getting ready to go mobile to their ambush site at sundown. Gallagher slings a LAAW over his shoulder and it detonates...spontaneous detonation of a Light Anti-Tank Assault Weapon and they're dead. No enemy around. Two young men blown to bits and nobody ever figured out why.
Then there's Greg Keller. Hot, humid day, long patrol. Take five, everybody, drop your rucks, smoke em if you got em. He shrugs off his ruck, sits down wearily...and disappears in a brilliant white flash and horrendous bang. Nothing but smoke and dust and blood and a mangled corpse. And no enemy around. Nobody to shoot at, nobody to pay for this.
Paul "Tex" Hernandez. Young kid from Texas. Shot in the back by a VC sniper. We carried him on a poncho to the medevac Huey and never expected to see him again. But he lived. He made it. He spent the rest of his life in a wheelchair and died of cancer in 1998.
We had contacts. We were pretty goddam good at killing the enemy. We did our job well. We killed them and got beer and those were the good times. Then one night Ronnie Ross get's murdered by an ARVN Lieutenant, shot down in front of us in a green-on-blue, 13 rounds of 556, pointblank, full-auto, right below the flak-jacket in the thighs and groin. A Mexican standoff ensues, Marines threatening to kill every goddam South Vietnamese in sight, the ARVNs ready to shoot back. Ross is bleeding out. Our Corpsman is working on him, but what the fuck can anybody really do with this kind of wound? I have to call in the medevac. Everybody's standing around with locked and loaded M16s, screaming at each other. Sgt. Hutson is trying to defuse the intensity.
I radio 7th Company HQ. Request priority medevac and immediate foot react to help us contain what might be a bloodbath. The XO says he's on the way with a react team but at least 20 minutes out. Eventually the guns start coming down. The minutes tick by. Doc is packing holes, he's got an IV going. He's doing everything he can to keep Ross alive. Twenty minutes go by. Sgt Hutson is getting frantic. Where the fuck is that Dust-Off? I don't know. It's taking forever. Finally I get the hand-off to the incoming bird. Are we taking ground fire? Negative. The XO arrives with six Marines. Strobe is out. Huey lands, we lug Ross to the bird and he's away. We get taken out of the bush that night, we hump two clicks to the 7th Co Compound to spend the rest of the night behind sandbags and barbed wire and I fucking breakdown and sob like a fucking baby.
A month later Ross dies in Japan. I'm back in the bush with a new team. Here, more gunfights, more weirdness, more casualties. A lot more casualties, more medevacs... and finally I get hit. Both legs, multiple frag wounds. But I'm alive, I didn't get captured and I'm not going to lose anything. It's over. Fuck the wounds. The physical wounds heal. They may hurt for years, decades...the pieces they leave in may migrate, form cists, itch, come out in the shower, need to get removed years down the road. But that's SOP. That's part of the deal. It's the other shit that hurts and never stops hurting.
______________________________________________
You get older. You take your medication. Shit happens in your life. I met a divorced woman with two little boys, fell in love, had a child of our own. A instant family. But still dealing with issues that threatened to destroy everything. Get help or I'm leaving. Get help or all this will vanish.
I'm a lucky, lucky man. I got help. I found out that other guys had been through the same shit. The war, yes, but more importantly, the years after the war, when you're drifting in a lonely sea and feel isolated from society. When pressures start building, bosses jump in your shit, bills pile up, you're in debt...these are things you can't shoot your way out of, you can't kill the bank, you can't kill the mortgage, the car payment. You have to realize that you need somebody to help you, the Vet Center, the VA, your battle buddies, your military peers, your friends and family. You've got to seek help and get it.
There is life and happiness after war and PTSD. War, for good or bad, is part of your character. It'll always be there. That's why old veterans in their 80s and 90s still shed a tear. It ain't going away. But you can come to terms with it. Through therapy, counciling, medication, spirituality, walking through the fucking woods. I've mentioned before that anti-depressants, counceling, group therapy with other combat vets...and my children have all helped me cope and have given me joy.
Never give up. The military trains you to never give up, even when things look the darkest. That goes for post-war life too. Life is a long movie, with many twists and turns and unexpected things happen all the time. You never know now where you'll be in ten years. Life is a movie. Never walk out before the show is over because if you do, you'll miss the Happy Ending.
Last edited:
).
